


Vested Interest

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: Fluff, Home Ownership, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-04 20:11:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3087515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris is finally getting kicked out of his house....unless Hawke has something to say about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vested Interest

Hawke was shivering on Fenris' doorstep when he noticed, well, the notice.

"That's new."

It was punched through the same nail that had pinned all tax and "condemned" notifications for the past six years. This one, however, had a bright red seal at the bottom Hawke had never seen before. He ripped it down and was still squinting at it when the door swung open.

"Did you know the seneschal wants to tear your house down?" Hawke handed Fenris the notice.

"Yes, that does look...important." He wadded it and tossed it in the snow. "Do they not teach Fereldens to come in out of the cold?"

"You know, it might be worth a copper to listen to their warnings this time." Hawke followed him into the gloom of the mansion, kicking the door shut and stomping his boots. "Aveline's been saying it forever, but she really can't cover for you on this anymore."

"If the seneschal wants his precious mansion-"

"Yes, yes, 'let them come.'" Hawke sighed, regarding his lover in the damp, musty antechamber with its mushrooms growing in the faded rug. "But seriously, Fen, I don't want to hear you've choked some poor civil servant to death. Try to care so I don't have to grope you through prison bars?"

"Nevermind that." Fenris grabbed his hand. "Come, I have something to show you."

"Oh?" Hawke's heart sped. Two months after their rekindling, and little things like Fenris willingly taking his hand still managed to floor him. He felt grateful, giddy even, as Fenris led him through the frigid foyer and up the stairs; instead of heading straight for the bedroom, however, Fenris took a right into a wing that, as far as Hawke knew, was nothing but rotted guest rooms.

"I don't think I've ever actually seen this half...." Their breath fogged as they walked down the dark corridor. Hawke stole a peek into a rubble strewn room where it snowed on dead rats and moldy, shattered furniture. "Though I can't _imagine_ why the seneschal wants to burn it to the bricks."

"Tch. I realize the mansion is depressing-"

"Oh, that's not true, I happen to think the frozen bat guano really brightens up the place."

Fenris sighed. "What I was trying to say, is despite that, you have always accommodated me here, even when it would have been more comfortable to meet elsewhere."

Hawke shrugged. "It's private. You like private."

"Even so, it's come to my attention that my.... _desires_ take you away from your home, without offering something better in return."

"You don't have to apologize for not sleeping at my place," said Hawke softly. It came as no surprise that his lover preferred the seclusion and familiarity of his lair over the bustling Amell Estate. If that meant Hawke had to shiver under stinking furs in a rickety bed in Fenris' drafty, foul pit of a mansion a few nights a week, then so be it. "And before you start, you don't have to apologize for anything else ridiculous either."

Fenris hummed. "After today, perhaps not."

They reached the closed door at the end of the hall. Here Fenris paused, one finger on the handle. His mouth crinkled, stricken with some uncertain emotion. "I uh....was searching for more firewood and could not help but notice that um...." He made a gesture to cough into his fist, but, adorably, forgot the cough. "Some of the rooms in this wing are....more amenable to...."

"Love, please tell me you built us a pillow fort."

Fenris scoffed and swung the door open. Hawke waited for his eyes to adjust-

"Oh."

-and was blinded by floor to ceiling sunlight. Warmth washed under his cloak and clothes in a hot sultry breath.

The room before him was... _a suite._

Hawke slouched against the doorframe. He could scarcely breathe from the shock of it. A suite. An actual, queen sized, fresh as spring guest suite in the middle of a desicated ruin. It would have been less startling if they'd stepped out of Darktown into Empress Celene's perfumed bedchamber.

Okay, it was more modest than that, but the room was still a stark contrast to the decay of the rest of the mansion. Softness and well-being radiated from every corner. The windows were water-stained, but washed and firmly sealed. The floor was cracked, but scrubbed clean. The roaring fireplace was swept, the rot peeled from the wallpaper, the moldering furniture removed, accents of crimson sashes and leather trunks added here and there until it was like peering through a looking glass at what the mansion must have looked like decades ago when first built.

More importantly, taking up half the room and probably costing as much if not more than the mansion itself, was the biggest feather bed Hawke had ever seen.

What else was there to say? "Wow." He pointed at it. "You could fit an Antivan orgy in that."

"There was so much debris in here before, I never saw it," said Fenris. Hawke could feel him at his back, anxious, watching him stroke the purple brocade bedspread. "You mentioned before that the bed in my room was....narrow."

"I believe my exact words were: 'if it was any smaller my ass would have to declare itself a peninsula.'" Hawke wandered over to a tea table and pressed his nose into a bouquet of hyacinths. "Andraste, where did you find these?"

"I learned from a certain Champion that there are nobles in this city who don't bother to lock their hothouses." Fenris came behind him, tentatively, and touched his shoulder. "I remember they used to grow in your garden...."

 _Before your mother died,_ he didn't say. 

Hawke's throat tightened as he turned. "You did this all by yourself?"

"Over a few months. If we are going to be together I-"

Before he could finish, Hawke gathered him against him chest and spun him around the room. "Hawke!"

Hawke kissed him all over his face. He was grinning like a lunatic. "You built a _love nest._ " Fenris made a disgusted noise and pulled away, then let himself be dragged back. "Admit it."

"I merely thought you'd like a warm place to-" Fenris sighed as Hawke purred into his neck. "You're not listening, are you?"

"I'm just flummoxed you never went all out for yourself." Hawke stroked his cheek with the back of his glove. "All those years in that tomb, when you could have had this."

"I suppose I just never had to proper motivation before." Fenris' mouth quirked. "Now, if you are done yammering....the bed remains untested."

Hawke let himself be dragged down into a hard kiss. It would have been a perfect moment....if part of his mind didn't drift back down the hall, across the foyer and out the door, to a crumpled piece of paper in the snow.

~

"Are you certain there's nothing you can do?"

Aveline's single loud 'HA' made Hawke wince.

"Nothing? All I've done for six years is lie, and obfuscate, and delay, and lose report after report so he can keep living in that pit." Her face was, remarkably, the same color as her hair. She also didn't seem to notice she was smearing the ink of her ledger with her fists. "Do you have any idea how hard that is when the seneschal's office is literally across the hall? It's time he find somewhere to live. Somewhere where he pays taxes like everyone else."

"You know how he is about that place." Hawke paced in front of her desk. The sunlight was hitting the snow outside Aveline's bank of windows, sharpening the white light to a painful glare. "It's _his_ , to him. He staked his claim there. He's not budging."

"Then he'll be removed, and subsequently arrested for breaking a guardsman's arm." Aveline sighed and touched her brow. "Can't you just get him to move in with you?"

Hawke winced again. It was a notion he'd toyed with in the past, had foolishly considered early on that his and Fenris' relationship might be nurtured by rubbing shoulders with each other everyday, but....

"He _needs_ that place, Aveline. It's where he goes to be alone. I know he acts like he hates it, but it's his territory."

"And this has nothing to do with him living a convenient block away from you?"

"No, actually." Hawke's mind drifted momentarily to two soft and spent bodies swallowed by an enormous feather bed, then shook his head. "Why is Bran so obsessed with this hovel all the sudden anyway? I thought he was out of a job with the Templars."

"It's not him, it's his interim replacement. _Messere_ Bentley is young, entrusted with a great deal of responsibility, and decided he has something to prove. He bulled right over me when I said I first needed to inspect the mansion for squatters. _He_ said he'd reviewed my reports from the past six years, and that I'd filed that order sixteen times and never made good on it." Aveline pinched her brow, face screwed up against the sunlight. "Andraste, you have no idea how long I had to sit there listening to that smug little shit read my own lies back to me." She opened her eyes, now hard. "You two ask _a lot_."

"Then maybe it's time I did my own research on this seneschal," murmured Hawke, tugging on his cloak.

" _Hawke._ " She fixed him with a glare.

"Just a friendly chat, promise." He flashed a grin back at Aveline she didn't mirror. "Besides, who could ever say no to the Champion?"

~

"No."

Messere Bentley sat behind an acreage of desk in the seneschal's office: quill cramped in one hand, Templar stamp at ready in the other. He favored a peevish woodchuck and couldn't have been a peach fuzz bristle over twenty.

"I'm sorry, serrah," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "But Champion or no, I have a job to do. The house has stood abandoned on its lot for the better part of a decade. It's an eyesore, the neighbors are complaining, _and_ there are reports of dead bodies inside."

Hawke started to say that actually they'd dumped those in the canal years ago, but thought better of it and lit up his best Champion smile. "That so?"

"Yes, that's so." Bentley looked back down over his spectacles and continued to write in what might have been the world's shrillest handwriting. "Regardless, I know you are here about the squatter."

Why beat around the bush. "He's helped save this city in ways you can't even fathom." It was so tempting to add 'little man' to the end of that sentence. "And the house is derelict. Gutting it would cost more than it's worth and I doubt there's a buyer in Kirkwall with the coin or ambition to renovate it. If it's taxes you're after, I can front them."

"I want him gone," said Bentley simply. "And I don't accept bribes."

"A Templar with integrity, color me impressed."

"I was entrusted with this position for a reason...and your sarcasm has been noted." Bentley waved his quill at the door. "Manage your people and get the elf off the property."

If there was one thing his life as a young noble had taught him, it was to keep his smile screwed on tight. Hawke strode up to the desk and set his fingers on the edge. "Or else?"

Bentley looked up slowly, a smile drawing on his face like a pulled curtain. He slid a parchment from the top of the stack beside him (oh, he must have been waiting for this), and showed its sharp little writing to Hawke.

"Or else I reveal to the Knight-Commander that not only has Guard Captain Vallen been forging tax reports for the past six years, but at your behest to encourage a squatter in High Town. A _knife-ear_ squatter, no less." Bentley returned the paper lovingly to the stack. "Not everyone in this city likes the way you play things. Or for that matter the way you seem to think you and your merry band of murderers can go around doing whatever you want, to whomever you want."

"I'm sorry, is this personal?"

"No, serrah, this is business."

"In that case-"

Hawke lunged across the desk and grabbed Bentley's throat before he could even _erg_ and dragged him bodily through his papers.

"-let me introduce you to the way I do business."

"You bastard." Bentley's eyes were watering. His fingernails rasped against the leather of Hawke's gauntlet. "You can't, _you can't-_ "

"You sleep on the left side of your bed, don't you?"

Bentley stopped fidgeting.

"Private quarters in the Templar barracks, little apple tree in the courtyard, white lattice under the window? You keep an amber paperweight on your desk and a Qunari horn in the third drawer. Your nightgown is green." Hawke leaned close until their noses touched. "And you buy cheap locks."

The seneschal's heartbeat was like a hummingbird under his fingers.

"I'm going to say this once, so listen close. If you ever threaten my friends again, I will find you. If I so much as touch the doorknob on that mansion, I will find you. If I hear a whisper that you called my companion a knife-ear or any other disgusting epithet again, I will find you. You're going to withdraw the condemned report and cite need for further investigation. Then you are going to forget all about that house and go about your little life, or one day you will hear a strange creak in the night, and when you look under your bed, I'll be there with a flensing knife to cut off your lips and feed them to you."

Hawke gave him a peck on the nose, then slapped him hard across the cheek.

"Now get to it." He dropped Bentley back into his chair and swept out of the room, snapping his fingers once behind him.

~

Hawke sighed against Fenris' chest. It was a rare thing to find himself held like a child in the elf's arms, and he didn't plan on moving any time soon.

"I really do need to get up, Hawke," chuckled Fenris, not budging an inch from where he lay warmed by Hawke's bare flesh.

"You build a love nest you pay the price. All that spit and feathers...." Hawke kissed his nipple. "Thanks, love."

A flush crept up Fenris' sternum to his throat. "I believe you've already repaid the debt several times over with interest."

"Romantic as ever with your metaphors, I see." Hawke swam his legs luxuriously through the ocean of down mattress until Fenris locked legs to keep him still. "Oh brave, beautiful, fluffy white dove, month after month threading twig by tender twig in twain, so he and his handsome falcon can have a place to fuck and rut without waking the neighbors. There, that's how it's done."

Fenris snorted and stroked his arm. "You forgot to compliment the bat guano."

"Say what you will about this place, but I think you'd be very unhappy if you lost it, not least because I'm a terrible housemate."

Fenris was silent for a long time. "I have grown used to it, that's the best I can say." He sounded almost wistful. "Not that it hasn't gathered some pleasant memories of late." He rolled Hawke under him, settling happily between his legs. The corner of his mouth upturned at the pleasant little groan it won him. "But if it vanished....I would not be without a home."

Hawke understood the meaning behind the meaning, but he was not so much a fool as to embarrass Fenris by saying it, not when the elf was now doing such a thorough job of stroking and kissing him into a puddle.

"By the way-" he murmured, his bottom lip pulled between teeth. "-that's probably my cue to mention that you'll never have to worry anyway becauseIthreatenedtomutilatetheseneschal."

Fenris pulled back to gape at him. When Hawke pouted, he chuckled darkly and shook his head. "On behalf of a hovel you made yourself an enemy. Why am I not surprised."

"It's a nice hovel." Hawke grinned and pulled him down, back into the business of making love in their warm little corner of a unkind, wintery world.

_And because you're my home, too._


End file.
